Theory on Demand

TOD #15: In the Facebook Aquarium: The Resistible Rise of Anarcho-Capitalism, Ippolita

By Miriam Rasch, June 23, 2015

Read online About this publication: In their new work research collective Ippolita provides a critical investigation of the inner workings of Facebook as a model for all commercial social networks. Facebook is an extraordinary platform that can generate large profit from the daily activities of its users. Facebook may appear to be a form of [...]

TOD #14: Transcoding the Digital: How Metaphors Matter in New Media, Marianne van den Boomen

By admin, February 12, 2014

Read online about this publication: Transcoding the Digital: How Metaphors Matter in New Media by Marianne van den Boomen is a material-semiotic inquiry into the constitutive role of metaphors in our daily encounters with computers and networks. While interface concepts such as desktop and windows are easily recognized as metaphors, this research shows how in [...]

TOD #13: The Dark Side of Google, Ippolita

By admin, October 4, 2013

  about this publication: In The Dark Side of Google Italian writers’ collective Ippolita provides a thorough, fresh analysis of what is behind the universe of Google and the metadata industry. In recent years Google has established itself as a major point of Internet access. We have progressively adapted to its sober, reassuring interface and [...]

TOD #12: Variant Analyses, Interrogations of New Media Art and Culture, Patrick Lichty

By admin, April 8, 2013

Read online about this publication: Lichty’s range of commentary and analysis dissects nearly two decades of what has now become new media society. Before Facebook’s IPO and Wikileaks’ media storm, artist-as-activists experimented with data gloves, virtual world performance, and anonymous, anarchic disruptions determined to bewilder traditional enclaves of art and political society. In this collection [...]

TOD #11: Creative Networks, in the Rearview Mirror of Eastern European History, Rasa Smite

By admin, November 25, 2012

About this publication: Creative Networks explores the dawn of the Internet culture in the age of network society from the perspective of Eastern Europe. From a theoretical angle the networks are introduced and interpreted as complex socio-technical systems. The author analyzes the development of these networked self-organized formations starting off with ‘virtual communities’ of ‘creative [...]

TOD #10: Beyond ICT4D: New Media Research in Uganda

By admin, November 25, 2012

About the publication: Beyond ICT4D: New Media Research in Uganda is a collection of ethnographic reports from diverse perspectives of those living at the other end of the African ICT pyramid. Crucially, these texts refocus on the so-called “ICT4D” debate away from the standard western lens, which depicts users in the developing world as passive [...]

TOD #9: My First Recession: Critical Internet Culture in Transition

By admin, November 25, 2012

About this publication: My First Recession starts after the party is over. This study maps the tran- sition of critical Internet culture from the mid to late 1990s Internet craze to the dotcom crash, the subsequent meltdown of global financial markets and 9/11. In his discussion of the dotcom boom-and-bust cycle, Geert Lovink lays out the [...]

TOD #8: Depletion Design: A Glossary of Network Ecologies

By admin, November 25, 2012

About this publication: Depletion Design suggests that ideas of exhaustion cut across cultural, environmentalist, and political idioms and offers ways to explore the emergence of new material assemblages. We, or so we are told, are running out of time, of time to develop alternatives to a new politics of emergency, as constant crisis has exhausted the means [...]

TOD #7: Image, Time and Motion: New Media Critique from Turkey

By admin, November 25, 2012

About the book: This reader is a collection of essays written by Turkish graduate students between 2003 and 2010 for Andreas Treske’s seminar ‘Image, Time and Motion’ at Bilkent University in Ankara, revised and actualized in 2010. Coming from a wide range of disciplines they had studied before, very rarely media or cultural studies, these [...]

TOD #6: Gaming Rhythms: Play and Counterplay from the Situated to the Global

By admin, November 25, 2012

About the book: Global gaming networks are heterogenous collectives of localized practices, not unified commercial products. Shifting the analysis of digital games to local specificities that build and perform the global and general, Gaming Rhythms employs ethnographic work conducted in Venezuela and Australia to account for the material experiences of actual game players. This book [...]